Fingerpainting on the Microsoft Surface


(with Julian Lepinski)

For a course on sketching interfaces with Prof. Karan Singh, a colleague and I wanted to explore how to use the rich input available with the Microsoft Surface (grayscale bitmap input) as a suitable artistic tool. For our specific project, we were inspired by painters that use a wide variety of colour overlaid on a base image. We thought it would be cool to use a fine base image that was already made, and “play” with colour on top of it. This is suitable as the Microsoft Surface is not great at fine input. We made a functional prototype where users could lay down paint and move it around by applying inertia.